another film recommended by well-known deviant james kincaid. and it is easy to see why kinky mcperv likes it so much: it takes the salacious, sex-mongering of a deviant and presents it as valid “research”. which, of course, is what kincaid himself does (once again see comment #4 here).
actually, “kinsey” is an excellent movie and i recommend it highly. directed by bill condon, who made the excellent “gods and monsters” some years ago, this is what every biopic should aspire to: an adult presentation of a complicated subject that neither canonizes him nor shoehorns his story into some existing template of well-meaning saint/savant triumphing against conventional morality. i don’t want to say too much about the content until more people have seen it, but i will say that i have not seen so many strong perfomances in one movie in a while. there isn’t a false note here: laura linney and peter saarsgard are excellent in the main supporting performances; in the smaller parts, timothy hutton and chris o’donnell do a lot with little; and even tim curry and the tragically underemployed oliver platt restrain themselves. at the center of all of this is a great performance by liam neeson–this is the kind of performance that makes you forget that there is “acting” going on.
watch it.
Lynn Redgrave is amazing.
Saw it last night, and agree with you mostly concerning Linney and Saarsgard. It was nice to see Lithgow’s character from Footloose make an appearance again. I kept waiting for a rockin’ Kenny Loggins track to be piped in. But it didn’t quite do it for me. Kinsey’s crusade didn’t ring entirely true to me. I liked the first hour best, when I could draw parallels to current schools giving out bogus information about intelligent design all over the country. Kinsey’s effort to just bring science into a topic filled with morality-fueled false info would be useful today for things like Dr Bill Frist claiming you can get AIDS from touching a crying person’s tears, and of course that the underlying theory to biology for the past hundred years is just “one theory, with significant controversy surrounding it.”
Once he gets into the case histories and the book publishing, it kind of lost me. Oh well.
Say, what’s Ralph Fiennes up to? Every time I see Liam Neeson, I wish I was watching Ralph Fiennes instead. He seems to have stopped making movies for a few years there.
Scratch that: I see on IMDB he has the lead role in The Constant Gardener, which is an excellent John LeCarre novel. I hope that’s good. He was great in Spider by Cronenberg a few years ago.
Re Fiennes:
Yeah–“Spider” was fantastic; I await, with bated breath, the Fiennes-less but I hear quite fine “History of Violence” by Cronenberg.
But Fiennes has been around–in, for instance, “Red Dragon” and “Maid in Manhattan”. He played a vicious, narcissistic serial killer romancing a shy retiring beautiful woman, I believe in the latter.
Spider: I agree. A wonderful film, and I know the Bean will agree. Went quietly here in the U.S., though was noticed abroad. Fiennes was great, as was Miranda Richardson (as always–has she ever turned in a bad performance?)
LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas singled out the new Cronenberg as one of the best things at Cannes this year.
Back to “Kinsey”:
We finished watching last night. I’ll echo the comments Arnab and Jeff made about acting. I love Oliver Platt, so it was nice to see him; Sarsgaard is great, so’s Linney. And, Mauer you’re wrong, Neeson is outstanding. There’s a scene early on when the Kinseys return to his family house, and Mac (Linney) does an imitation of his father’s ponderous sermonizing–both burst into laughter, and Neeson looks like a child, caught off-guard in full guffaw… and in a second we realize it’s a cry, he sobs about his father and apologizes… well, from that moment on I felt such compassion–the same kind of compassion the film (and Kinsey, the film argues) demanded when we see/encounter/enjoy such a range of behaviors.
I’d also note that the film wears lightly the burdens of the biopic, but it never entirely shelves or sidesteps such generic conventions as the conclusive moment of reiteration, or the structure of such films: intro–historical origins for present behaviors, first act rise to success, second act own hubris/peccadilloes disrupt sunshiney feelings, third act crisis from without, coda–but ain’t it all really somethin’! I’m being a bit snide because there are wonderful flashes of the wit Condon showed in putting together “Gods and Monsters”, sly steps like having interviewers ask questions at us, the map of heads responding… I wish there were more; I wish it had gone in a more challenging direction.
Maybe it didn’t because of the challenging subject matter. We still (in American culture) wriggle when the normalcy of sexual difference rubs up against us. And Kinsey’s life is shaded just dark enough–and his studies occasionally just “troubling” enough (even to those of us who, unlike Mauer, embrace sexual difference)–to sidestep the pat liberal-minded embrace.
That’s a good thing. The film does have too much clarity about right and wrong, and allows us some easy outs–Kinsey’s rightness is centered when the (justly marginal, the film suggests) Braun character (William Sadler) displays his own book of “research,” full of accounts of his conquests, including many rapes, pedophilia, and so on. And if we had any doubts, we end with Lynn Redgrave’s “history”–which clarifies how important a force the Kinsey study has been.
I do NOT disagree with that conclusion. And I very much appreciate the film’s generosity–other than Braun, the movie avoids cheap villains; even Kinsey’s dad is the product of social repression. But that conclusion makes the film’s generosity, its embrace of difference, too clean and clear. For this viewer, anyway.
I’ll give a counterexample: T.C. Boyle’s last novel, _The Inner Circle_, is about Kinsey and his researchers. Like the movie, it seems to feel obliged to pass some kind of judgment about how this research leaves out love, and the (always already) centrality of love’s boundaries. (More on this in a moment.) And it’s remarkably ungenerous–Kinsey is a stiff, stern, troubled, even troubling sexual-obsessive, whose controlling nature gets darker and darker as the novel progresses. It handles the scene with the Braun character differently; the novel’s Kinsey makes no judgment, offers no challenges to Braun–not even the subtle but unmistakable “moral lesson” the film’s Kinsey lays out. Instead, the novel’s Kinsey sees this as ripe evidence, and refuses to judge the man… That lack of judgment makes it harder for me to “like” the novel’s Kinsey. Similarly, Kinsey’s later interest in self-mutilation and pain as sexual pleasure is starker and less pitiful in the novel; he just shoves a toothbrush up his urethra, while in the movie sad-faced Neeson drips some blood and explains that he was trying to understand, and not trying to enjoy … whereas the novel makes it clear that enjoyment (or–and!–repulsion are central to understanding)… I’m digressing, but perhaps my point is kind of clear: the novel’s Kinsey challenges us *as* a figure of difference, where the movie takes an easier route to use our identifications with Kinsey to ease us into accepting difference elsewhere.
Maybe I’m being ungenerous; the film does push way beyond the typical realms of a biopic-protagonist’s “flaws”…. but I still found myself wishing for a bit more tough-mindedness.
Then again, if we see the biopic as a sermon, or a moral lesson–as didactic (and we should), Condon’s film is far more effective. In short, I think I find the film effective but too interested in that lesson, even ‘though I applaud that such a lesson is being taught. But I learned more about my own responses to sexuality, morality, and difference with the novel’s far less compassionate ironies.
I’m not sure
I forgot the little comment about love. I do find it interesting that we are unable to come up with a narrative about Kinsey’s report or research or his own sexuality which doesn’t feel compelled to note that he/it is, yes yes, liberating, but what about love and emotions?
And by interesting I mean irritating. I think it’s a humanist move, to “restore” the ineffable (and metaphysical) to sexuality, when Kinsey’s research might lead us out of such naturalizing assumptions.
It would probably be interesting to wrestle with Kinsey and Foucault’s _History of Sexuality_, to see if (or how) the scientific knower is not outside the social assumptions Kinsey so often lambasts but inside, reproducing them…
…but beats me what to say. I think I’m going to teach this, with another guy here at Hamline, in a course on Sexuality. I’ll write back in two years when we’ve done the course and let you know what I think about that connection.